


A Place to Exist

by I_have_lost_control_of_my_life



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Akaashi Keiji is a Good Significant Other, Boys In Love, But also, Comfort, Couch Cuddles, Dreams, Established Relationship, First Meetings, Fluff, How Do I Tag, I promise this is soft, M/M, Magical Realism, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Sad Bokuto Koutarou, Seeing your future in a dream, Soulmates, Wish Fulfillment, Wishes, but they're soulmates, it's not a soulmate au, kind of?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 11:41:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29982324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_have_lost_control_of_my_life/pseuds/I_have_lost_control_of_my_life
Summary: “I wish I had somewhere I belonged.”He watched as the coin arched up into the air, glinting in the low light of the day. It landed in the water with a soft flop, and Koutarou waited with bated breath for something to happen. After a few minutes, the world continued on as it usually did, and he couldn’t help the disappointment that swelled in his chest. It’s not like he actually expected it to work, but it would’ve been nice if it did.~After making a wish, Bokuto's life changes when he begins to have dreams about a man named Keiji, and he finally has someone he can exist with, even if it's just in his head. He appreciates the dreams, but wishes that he had someone in his life who could make him feel the way Keiji does.It's not until Akaashi Keiji walks into his life that he realizes that his dreams might be much more real that he had initially hoped to believe.
Relationships: Akaashi Keiji/Bokuto Koutarou
Comments: 1
Kudos: 39





	A Place to Exist

Contrary to what most people might think, Koutarou was actually incredibly self aware, even from an early age. He knew that he was loud. He knew that, more often than not, he rubbed people the wrong way. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t sit still for more than five minutes without feeling like he was going to explode, couldn’t make himself stay quiet like all the other kids could. Over the years, he became accustomed to the way people parted in the halls when he passed, and came to expect the strange looks and whispers that followed him wherever he went. That was just the way his life worked.

That being said, there was still something incredibly hollow about being alone all the time. 

For Koutarou, the day started like any other. He showed up, sat alone at lunch, got yelled at for being distracting in a few of his classes, and just generally found it hard to pay attention to the material being thrown at him for a majority of the day. By the time his day ended, he was practically vibrating in his skin, everything around him feeling like too much and not enough at the same time. Practice had been cancelled which meant that he didn’t have his usual outlet for all of his restless energy, resulting in him taking the long route home. It was typically less crowded which meant he could burn off the extra energy without too many odd stares from passersby on the street.

So he hummed and he kicked every stone that he came across, easily releasing all of the excess energy that he had uselessly tried to keep pent up all day. Usually he would continue this pattern all the way home, but today he happened to pause, taking notice of something that had never really caught his attention before.

Just before the street he would usually take a left on, there was an old well that had been there since Koutarou was old enough to walk home from school by himself. He had never taken time to stop and appreciate the structure before, but during lunch earlier in the day he had overheard a conversation between two girls who were talking about how some people threw coins into wells or fountains and made wishes, only for those wishes to come true.

It would be ridiculous, right? If he made a wish, there was no way it would come true. Even thinking about it was a waste of time. But… would it hurt anything if he did? 

For a few moments, he stared at the well, considering. 

He carefully took a coin out of his pocket.

Making sure he was alone on the street, he examined the coin resting in the middle of his palm with a removed interest. To say that he felt silly would be an understatement. Quite frankly, he felt like an idiot, but…

“I wish I had somewhere I belonged.”

He watched as the coin arched up into the air, glinting in the low light of the day. It landed in the water with a soft  _ flop _ , and Koutarou waited with bated breath for something ( _ anything _ ) to happen. After he waited for a few minutes, the world continued on as it usually did, and he couldn’t help the disappointment that swelled in his chest. It’s not like he  _ actually  _ expected it to work, but it would’ve been nice if it did.

~~~

When he woke up the next day, he was blinded by sunlight, and his bed felt solid beneath him. After blinking a few times, he realized that, no he wasn’t in his bed. He wasn’t even in his house! He was outside, but how-?

“Koutarou? Are you okay?” 

He jumped, startled by the voice. Before he was even aware of what he was doing, he was turning towards the mysterious voice, only for his breath to be immediately stolen at the sight of the person next to him. 

The man had dark curly hair and high cheek bones with steel blue eyes that practically glowed behind the man’s thick glasses frames. He was absolutely stunning. 

“You’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen,” Koutarou blurted before he could fully process what he was saying. Immediately, his face burned as mortification grew in his chest. 

Luckily, the man didn’t seem upset. Instead, he just laughed, a pretty pink flush spreading across his face.  _ Even his laugh is beautiful.  _ His face grew hotter.

“You can’t just say things like that, Koutarou,” the man said, still slightly breathless.

“But it’s true!” He shouted, apparently dead set on killing himself via humiliation. “I didn’t know it was possible for people to be as pretty as you are.”

The man settled back on the ground, cheeks painted red and lips pulled into a light smile. “That’s not the first time you’ve said that.”

There is a small part of his brain that tells Koutarou that he should be freaked out. As familiar as this all felt, he had never actually met this man before, and he still wasn’t quite sure how he’d gotten here in the first place, and yet, he felt at peace with this stranger. There was no tension in the air, no second guessing himself. For the first time in a while, He could just breathe. He could exist.

Chilled fingers wrapped around his hand, squeezing it with the barest hint of pressure. When he looked to the side, he found concerned eyes staring at him intensely. “Are you alright? You’re being very quiet today.” 

Unsure of how to respond, Koutarou put on his best smile. “I’m fine. Besides you’re probably glad to get me to stop talking for once, right?”

That was apparently the wrong thing to say. The man sat up, his lovely face twisted into an alarmed frown. “Not at all,” he declared with so much certainty that Koutarou couldn’t help but be a little startled. Bringing up the hand he wasn’t leaning on, the dark haired stranger began to run his fingers gently through Koutarou’s hair. “You know I like listening to you talk, Koutarou. Why would you say something like that?”

The sincerity that dripped from those words made something inside his chest snap. Suddenly the air around them was too hard to breathe, his throat too tight to function properly. He had to focus on the clouds again to avoid the tears that were starting to burn in his eyes. “I guess I’m just stuck in my own head is all.”

He ignored the blue eyes that stared at him, pointedly glaring at the sky. After a minute or so, the man laid down again, this time with his head on Koutarou’s shoulder, their sides pressed together. A pleasant warmth flowed through his veins at the contact, and once again, he couldn’t help but think about how content he felt in this space.

The silence was broken when the stranger pointed to the sky, fixating on a particular cloud. “What does that one remind you of?”

“A dragon,” Koutarou replied without hesitation.

He could feel the vibrations on his chest from the man's hum. “I think it looks more like a bird.”

Koutarou furrowed his eyebrows and tilted his head, trying to see the bird. He could  _ kind of  _ see it, but really it looked more like a dragon. Without really thinking about it, he began to compare in what ways the cloud looked like a dragon and in what ways it looked like a bird. When he finished his rambling explanation, the man pointed at another cloud, asking the same question. They continued like this until the shapes of all of the clouds had been decided and the pair fell silent. 

“Koutarou,” the man muttered, turning to look him in the eyes, “I love you.”

Those three words were filled with an indescribable amount of fondness and admiration, and Koutarou knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that  _ this  _ is where he belonged.

“I love you too, Keiji.”

He blinked and was suddenly back in his bed, breathing rapidly with his heart thundering in his chest. 

_ It was a dream… _

_ It was all a dream. _

There were no words that could express the rush of emotions that flooded him at the realization. His chest felt oddly hollowed, aching in a way he had never experienced before. The only way he could think to describe it would be disappointment, but that didn’t account for the way his eyes burned, or the undeniable feeling that he had lost something very important to him.

At the same time, he was strangely grateful. He didn’t know it was possible for him to be so at peace with another person, and it was nice to have the knowledge that he could experience such an emotion.

_ Keiji. _

_ I called him Keiji in my dream. _

Koutarou felt detached from himself for the rest of the day, his mind overrun with thoughts of steel eyes and cold fingers. He hardly remembered what he did in any of his classes as he was too busy trying to draw the man from his dream in case the memory started to fade. In the blink of an eye, he was getting ready for bed again, slowly clamoring into bed while his covers up to his chin. 

He fell asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow, completely exhausted from the way his thoughts had been racing all day. Unfortunately, it didn’t take him long for his body to wake him up again, his mind gradually becoming more aware of his surroundings. With a groan, he squeezed his eyes tight, burrowing further into his pillow as a small rebellion against the inevitability of him having to get up. 

His eyes flew open when his pillow moved against him, something that his pillow has never done before. It took Koutarou’s brain a full two seconds to realize that he was once again waking up in a place that was not his bed and that it was not a pillow cradled against his chest, but-

“Keiji?”

The man that had been plaguing his thoughts all day was indeed in his arms, angling his body towards him that allowed Koutarou to get a clearer look at his face.

“Sorry,” he whispered, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Koutarou didn’t answer, his brain still trying to piece together what was going on. His eyes drifted across the unfamiliar living room, skimming across photos he doesn’t remember being taken before landing on the beaten up couch they were sitting on. 

Like the night before, a cold hand made contact with his skin, coming up to cradle his face and forcing him to look directly into Keiji’s concerned-filled eyes. “Koutarou, are you alright?”

“Yeah! I am. I am, I’m just,” Keiji’s thumb began to rub lightly against his cheek, distracting him. It wasn’t until one of Keiji’s eyebrows rose up slightly that he realized he never finished speaking. 

“Tired,” he concluded lamely.

The quiet of the room was broken when Keiji hummed, leaning up to press a kiss to Koutarou’s cheek before turning back to the book he was annotating in his hands. “Let me finish this chapter, and then we can go take a nap, okay?”

“Okay.”

So they continued to sit together, Keiji making the occasional mark in his book while Koutarou absentmindedly traced patterns into his sides. He doesn’t remember falling asleep again, but he must have at some point because the next time he opened his eyes, he was back in his own bed again. 

This continued almost every single night for months, and by the time he reached his second year of high school, the odd dreams were simply a part of his life. Things had gotten a little better for him in that time; he had a better relationship with his high school team (even if they could be put off by his high energy and unpredictable mood swings), and he’d even made a friend in a rival team, Kuroo Tetsurou, who he instantly clicked with when they first met. Still he couldn’t help his mind from wandering from time to time to thoughts about his dreams and the mysterious man who never failed to appear in them.

It had never occurred to him that Keiji might be a real person. He had always just assumed that Keiji was just someone his brain had conjured up to deal with how lonely he felt a lot of the time, and he never considered that might not be true until the first practice of his second year.

He was doing warm up stretches when a voice made him pause. It had come from the group by the door, so it was probably a new member; however, for some reason the voice sounded incredibly familiar to Koutarou, he just couldn’t place where he had heard it before.

The voice spoke up, just loud enough to be distinguishable. “I am Akaashi Keiji…” The rest of his words faded out because Koutarou almost fell over where he was standing.

Keiji.

_ Keiji. _

_ Keiji! _

He almost broke his neck in his haste to turn towards the gym door. 

Standing there was the most beautiful person Koutarou had ever seen. He was smaller than Koutarou would have expected, and he wasn’t wearing the glasses that he had come to expect to find on Keiji’s face, not to mention his expression was much more closed off than it was in his dreams. But when the first year looked at him, he was definitely met with the same blue eyes that had been haunting his thoughts for over a year now. Everything came to a halt around them as Koutarou saw Keiji in person for the first time. There was no sound, no movement, just the two of them on opposite sides of the gym.

A sharp whistle drew Koutarou’s attention away from the setter as the captain called the team to start practice. He was distracted the whole time, too busy watching the literal person of his dreams, absolutely terrified that if he looked away, Keiji would disappear. For the first time in his life, he was relieved when practice was over, wasting no time in rushing to where Keiji was standing, pausing a few feet away from where he other boy was standing.

He was uncharacteristically nervous, unconsciously fiddling with his hands behind his back as he called out to the first year. 

“Hey, uh,” He stumbled in his words, almost slipping up and calling him Keiji. “Akashi-kun.”

The first year glanced up at him, his mouth pulled into an indifferent line across his face. “It’s Akaashi.”

_ Akaashi _ .  _ Akaashi Keiji _ . 

“Could you please help me practice spikes for just a little bit?” Already he could hear the voices of some of his teammates reacting to his proclamation, and he wasn’t sure what he would do if Akaashi turned him down because of them. 

“Of course, Bokuto-san.” 

A smile bloomed across his face, bright and unrestrained. He still didn’t know what the dreams meant, or if the first year Akaashi Keiji was anything like the Keiji he’d been having dreams about, but none of that mattered in the moment. Right now, with Akaashi staring at him expectantly from his spot by the net, Koutarou knew that this was the start of something great, and he couldn’t wait to see what the future had in store for the pair of them.

For once, he knew he was exactly where he belonged.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my second time writing Bokuaka and I STILL can't figure out how to write their dynamic smh. I'll get there one day
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed! Feel free to comment any critiques or insights, I'm always open to feedback!


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